3 min reading timeThe CEO of SEOmoz, delighted to present in his hometown at today’s Seattle Interactive Conference (#SIC2011) after traversing the globe, is polished and engaging speaker. VC-funded SEOmoz powers hundreds of thousands of sites.
His best quote:
If you don’t have great content, social can’t help you.
If you do, social rewards it.
Below, my takeaways.
We don’t buy from interruption marketing anymore.
We search (Google). We ask friends (Facebook). And experts (CNET). Communities (Twitter, Quora). We visit company websites for every detail. Maybe we buy there. Maybe we go to Amazon.
Inbound marketing – any tactic that relies on earning’s people interest rather than buying it.
Content is the foundation of great inbound marketing. Search is not “so 2007.” Search is how things get found. Look in your referral sources. You’ll still see search is your number one source of traffic.
92% send or read email. 92% search. There are more than 3 billion searches per day on Google. (Page 57.)
As direct marketers, we like to see how many referrals, how many conversions, how much did I spend, was it worth it.
But social lives at the top of the funnel. Social is discovery prior to interest. (Page 59):
- Discovery (Social sources like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, typically fit the discovery phase),
- Realization of need and Consideration (search starts when realizing a need and help throughout the consideration process as well),
- Conversion,
- Retention.
100 million knew Bin Laden before the announcement because someone in the administration tweeted it.
The funnel only exists so it can convert.
“How we made $1 million for SEOmoz – with one landing page and a few emails” showed the “boost from landing page optimization and email promotion.” They hired a team. They got on the phone with customers. They asked surveys. Why did you buy? Why did you quit? They aligned the messages on those pages.
A lot of conversion is wrapped in soft metrics.
10 actionable tactics with examples (Pages 83 through 100)
1. Data as content marketing.
2. Video content and SERP virtual – video XML site maps (Learn SEO | SEOmoz) wistia.com hosts their videos. cool data about the videos. embed code the link points back to SEOmoz (AOL video does this too). They send SEO information to google directly.
3. Thought leadership and rel=author (Google+ profile serves as the conduit) because it shows your image. *** This sells me (Joe Hage) on Google+.
4. Social networks for personalized rankings. Share worthy content, share socially, earn rankings boost, get natural links through visibility, earn more social followers, network amplification grows reach.
5. Seerinteractive.com/blog/using-twitter-and-backlinks-to-build-links Link building with your social followers. Use vlookup in Excel with the Linkscape API to see if they are linking to you yet. Engage with or reach out to sites you want links from. If you follow us on Twitter, then you have a reason to ask them to guest post and link to you. You are in their world already.
6. Long tail SEO via gamification. On Quora, “What is the best single piece of SEO advice?” Rand’s answer. LinkedIn says “You are 80% complete.” You MUST fill it in to get 100%. You MUST get three stars on Angry Birds!
7. PR is a very tough practice. PR through Social Outreach. Followerwonk is “badass awesome.”
8. Viral worthy content via Q+A research. Quora shows what people care about in your niche. “Let’s go to Google discussion search and see what CPAs are asking about.”
9. Influence search suggest through branding. Influenced by prior search volume from tweets and Google+ shares. Do me a favor, he tested: do a search for “travel blog everywhereist” and then five days later everywhereist showed up as a suggestion.
10. Leverage thought leaders to build content. Identify leading influencers in your space, recruit them to contribute something small, perhaps just a few suvery answers, then aggregate and share the data. They will help it spread. The question was “how much do you charge for a website” and all forty shared the post. blog.folyo.me/post/how much does a website cost.
This stuff works, even for boring categories. The scale is, of course, different. So if you happen to be THE person who has answered the questions in the Quora, you win!
An advertising practice called retargeting: When they visit your site, cookie them, so you can serve ads to them to give familiarity and trust with banner ads to recapture the audience you already attracted.
Early adopters tend to benefit disproportionately on new platforms; i.e.; Google+. It is Rand’s opinion that Google will not allow Google+ to fail.
StumbleUpon traffic is even lower quality than Twitter and Facebook’s. My take, it’s not relevant for readers of the Medical Marcom blog.
